AFI Fest: SPC picks up Argentina’s Oscar hopeful

Soledad Villamil and Ricardo Darin in The Secret in Their Eyes

I quickly got backed up on coverage of the recently concluded AFI Fest this year, but I’m determined to work through it. I’ll jump ahead to The Secret in Their Eyes (El secreto de sus ojos) because it was picked up for US distribution this afternoon by Sony Pictures Classics, a company seemingly determined to corner the market on foreign Oscar entrants with Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon (Germany) and Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet (France) already in the stable.

Argentian director Juan Jose Campanella’s film deftly straddles a fine line between murder mystery, thriller and haunting romance without ever skipping a beat. In the end, though it delivers the rough genre beats it promises, this is a resonant film as much about memory and characters haunted by their pasts – about the paths taken and not taken – as it is about clever narrative.

It also delivers a surprising comic note in the form of wry, fatalistic strokes of dialogue delivered by its talented cast. For good measure, there’s a terrific, fluidly captured chase scene between investigator and suspect that’s more surprising and gripping as anything in an over-edited Tony Scott or Michael Bay sequence.

Secret begins with a dreamlike sequence as a man struggles with either memory or imagination in writing an opening for a planned novel. It turns out he is Benjamin Esposito, a retired criminal court investigator using a brutal unsolved murder as raw material for his first novel. Told partly in flashback and partly in the present day, the film tracks how the case went bad and also how the man continues to cope with it in the present day. Turning for help with his narrative impasse to his old superior with whom he shared an unrequited love, old wounds both professional and romantic are reopened. Believing it’s never to late to make right, Esposito embarks once again on both the case and the romance nearly 25 years later.

Ricardo Darin gives a soulful yet grounded and humorous performance as Esposito and he’s matched by pretty Soledad Villamil as Irene, the object of his love. Also of note is Pablo Rago as the man torn apart by the death of his new wife whose murder is central to the film. Rounding out the cast is Argentina’s noted actor/comedian Guillermo Francella who gives a funny and tragic turn as Sandoval, Esposito’s alcoholic partner.

Though the story is told from Esposito’s perspective, it’s about how each of these people were changed in some way by the untimely and brutal death of a beautiful young woman and how her murder was swallowed and spit out by Argentina’s corrupt bureaucracy.

Filed under: Acquistions, Film Festivals
Tags: AFI Fest, El secreto de sus ojos, Guillermo Francella, Juan Jose Campanella, Pablo Rago, Ricardo Darin, Soledad Villamil, The Secret in Their Eyes